Intention-guided Web Sites: A New Perspective on Adaptation

Recent years witnessed a rapid growth of multimedia technologies for offering information and services on the internet. One of the many problems that are to be faced in this context is the great variety of possible users and the consequent need to adapt both the presentation of information and the interaction to the specific user's characteristics. There is a general agreement that an adaptive web system should keep a model of the user's intentions, interests, and preferences, nevertheless, most of the research on adaptive web systems is based on the idea of associating each user with a “user model” and to dynamically build web pages, based on the profile given by that model. However, for the sake of a more complete adaptation -especially at the navigation level- it seems necessary to give a greater importance to the user's intentions both at the beginning of and during the interaction with the system. In our view this aspect of adaptation is currently underestimated. For achieving a dynamical site generation which is guided by the user's intentions, the system should keep track of such intentions and of their evolution during the interaction, and it should use them during its reasoning, when it plans dynamically personalized navigation routes. This is the topic of our current research, whose main lines are presented in this article.